by Bill Hopkins
The odor of Pine Sol and Comet permeated the air in his tidy house. His gaze rose to a six-foot sword mounted on the kitchen wall. What better place for a cutting instrument than in the kitchen? Its blade shone from the reflected light of the buzzing fluorescent light.
“There are no witnesses. I don’t know if the murderer was a man or a woman. I don’t know if there was more than one murderer.”
The cross guard of the sword held a curlicue snake on each side. A pommel in the shape of a monster’s head topped the grip, decorated with the scales of justice. Below the cross guard, the sword’s blade gleamed, sharp and deadly.
He paced around the table, nearly tripping over a chair, forcing himself to understand that maybe he knew more about the murder than his conscious mind allowed him to know. After all, he was first on the scene after the killer left.
“What was at that place before the flood?”
He closed his eyes. He stepped through the recollection of the crime scene with excruciating slowness. Bloated bodies. Rocks. Dirt. Trees. River. He got his camera and reviewed the photos on it.
“What am I not seeing?”
Rosswell returned to the table and sat. He stared beyond the bottle to a black and white print of an ancient Scottish battle scene on the wall until the picture became unfocused.
His thoughts ambled to the sword. For the last seven years, he’d tried to convince himself that it was a centuries old relic from his Scots ancestors. In truth, it was a replica he’d bought in a junk store for $169.47, after haggling the toothless woman who owned the place down from two hundred dollars.
“The murderer killed two people and laid them side by side. Why?”
His heartbeat slowed, his breathing slowed, and his vision blurred even more.
“Side by side. They lay side by side. Arms, legs, head, torso. What position, exactly, were they lying in?”
His mind hovered in a meditative state.
“What did I look at that I did not see?”
He recited the mantra several more times.
His cellphone chirped an irritating three-tone chime. A text message. “Crap,” he said, the spell broken by the electronic interference.
Only Tina, Frizz, and Neal were privy to the cell number. No one else, not even Ollie, had the number. This late at night, there had to be some emergency. He’d probably have to issue a search warrant. Or maybe Tina wasn’t coming over. Wouldn’t she call instead of texting?
He stared at his phone. The screen showed the texter’s identification: UNKNOWN. The message was clear: 2 DWN UR NXT.
“Real funny, Neal.” He turned the phone off. “You’re a real asshole.”
His exercise in meditative thinking resulted in zero. The next choice, he knew, was booze or wait for Tina. He reached for the bottle, feeling the weight of the liquor, caressing the smoothness of the glass, touching the highs and lows of the embossed label. Rosswell drew the bottle from the paper bag and lifted it up to the light and marveled at the pure color. The imagined taste of the amber liquid, burning down his throat in blessed relief, blossomed in his mouth.
He checked his watch. Nearly 10:00 PM. Too late to get drunk. And if he did get drunk, Tina would find him. She would leave him if she found him drunk.
Roswell stood. He yawned, stretched, and aimed his exhausted body for the bedroom. What better place to wait for Tina than in bed?
A gunshot shattered his kitchen window, fragmenting the bottle. Tiny shards of glass and a pungent spray covered the table. The noise deafened him momentarily, quickly replaced by ringing in his ears. Who the hell was shooting at him?
Although the scene lasted but a few seconds, in his mind it stretched out like a bad dream that lasted hours. For another second, Rosswell stood frozen. His brain kicked his butt into gear with the knowledge that the next slug would burst through his brain, rendering it useless. He would be dead. He dove for the floor.
Rosswell collected the presence of mind to scrabble to the switch, reach a shaking arm upward, and cut the lights in the kitchen. Once the room was plunged into darkness, he tore the sword from the wall, and sprinted down the hallway, flipping off every light. When he gained the living room, he turned off all the lights. Thus far, there’d been one gunshot. He clutched the sword and waited by the front door.
Breathing so hard he felt like his lungs had inflated to twice their normal size, he used one hand to reach for his cellphone. Patting him- self down twice, he realized he’d left the damned thing in the kitchen. He groped for and found his landline phone. His sweaty hand closed around the handset and pressed it to his ear. It was dead. From the living room window, he spotted the phone company’s pedestal next to the street. It held the copper snaking to the house. The pedestal had been knocked over, wires strewn everywhere.
Someone rushed through the front door. “Rosswell!”
Rosswell heard a noise outside, at the back of his house. He grasped the sword, hefting it above his head in a warrior’s stance and whirled around to see who might be coming in the back door, all the while realizing that bringing a sword to a gun fight wasn’t a good idea.
Rosswell yelled, “Come on, you son of a bitch. Bring it on.”
Vowing to slice and dice anybody who came after him, he danced around the living room, slashing at the air with the sword. No one would dare attack him when he had that sword.
Another gunshot exploded. Then another. Each shot produced a strobe-light flash.
Before the blackness reached out and grabbed him, he turned around and glimpsed Tina in the living room, standing just inside the front doorway, reaching for him before she crashed to the floor.
Chapter Eight
Monday night into Tuesday morning
“Judge, can you hear me?”
Rosswell squinted through one eye. What he saw through the haze didn’t encourage him. Neal leaned over him, their faces nearly touching. Rosswell moaned, expecting the sword to plunge through his heart at any moment. Neal’s hair brushed Rosswell’s cheek, causing a glacial shudder down his spine. Death hovered close. Instead of the sword, maybe Neal had found Rosswell’s .38 and was fixing to shoot him.
The smell surrounding Rosswell conjured a memory of a fireworks display. Was he at a Fourth of July celebration? The taste in his mouth felt as if he’d been chewing pennies. There was another smell. An unpleasant smell. Blood.
There could be only one rational conclusion about what was happening. “I’ve died and gone to hell.”
“No, you’re not dead,” Neal said. “Keep your mouth shut.”
“If I’m not dead, why do I have to keep my mouth shut?” He groaned. “I’m hurt bad.”
“Keep your mouth shut.”
It hurt him to talk, but Rosswell had to know. “Why the hell did you shoot me?” And, he wondered to himself, Are you going to shoot me again? “You destroyed a fifth of Glenfiddich 18-year-old single malt Scotch.” He hated giving Neal any ideas, such as that he’d been considering drinking the whole bottle. “Tell me before I die why you shot me.”
“Ross, shut up.”
“My name… .” He found it difficult to think. “It’s not Ross. It’s… .”
“You haven’t been shot, so shut up,” Neal ordered.
Rosswell’s insides burned. Someone must’ve stuck a red-hot poker through him. Neal was lying. He’d either been shot or was having one hell of an acid reflux attack. No one had ever shot him when he’d served with the Marines in Iraq. He had to wait until he returned to the safety of his hometown before he caught a round.
“Rosswell,” a second voice said, “open your other eye.”
That surprised Rosswell. He thought both eyes were open. With difficulty, he opened his other eye. The view, although still blurry, cleared with an agonizing slowness. His glasses were still on his face. How was that possible?
“Who are you?” Rosswell asked. “Are you Neal’s accomplice?”
“It’s Frizz. Your neighbor called 911 when he heard the first gunshot.
”
“Neal shot me.”
“No, Neal didn’t shoot you.”
“Who shot me?” Rosswell’s throat grew dry and his voice croaked.
Frizz said, “Neal and I were driving around, talking about the murders. We were practically in front of your house when we got the call.”
Rosswell said, “You were planning my murder?” Neal still worked on Rosswell, doing something Rosswell couldn’t see.
“Don’t talk, Ross.”
“Can you see me?” Frizz asked.
He held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Is that your foot?”
“No, Judge, it’s my hand.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Neal said. “Don’t ask him any more questions. He’s too stupid.”
Rosswell felt Neal’s hands on him. That wasn’t a good sign. Neal’s hands felt like a glob of rubbery worms crawling over his flesh. In the distance, Rosswell heard the electronic warbling of a siren. There must’ve been a fire somewhere.
“Where am I?” Rosswell twisted his head from side to side.
Neal said, “You’re in your house. You cut yourself with your sword.”
“You shot me,” Rosswell said. “Don’t lie to me, you son of a bitch.”
Neal said, “I’ve stabilized you and we’re waiting for the ambulance.”
Rosswell said, “The … what?”
Frizz said, “You must’ve slipped and cut your arm with your sword. An ambulance is taking you to the hospital.”
Then the real horror of the situation walloped into Rosswell’s gut. He wrenched his head around, looking left and right, up and down. “Where’s Tina?”
Neal and Frizz glanced at each other for a millisecond, but Rosswell wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t catch it.
His hands rubbed across the floor, finding a sticky puddle. His blood. And Tina’s blood. Mixed. It had to be. There was too much blood to come from one wound.
Rosswell said. “Is she all right?”
Rosswell smelled booze. Scotch, to be exact. Had he passed out at a party?
“The EMTs are coming,” Neal said.
“Are they going to pronounce me dead?” he said.
The EMTs sprinted into the house and Rosswell passed out again.
In his stupor, Rosswell heard a blonde woman tell him, “Do any- thing you want.” He lifted a hand. She said, “Don’t mess with the makeup.” She poured herself a large single malt Scotch.
“Take your clothes off,” he heard himself say.
The blonde said, “Take them off slow or fast?”
Was it Tina talking to him? The woman’s face filled with fog. He tried to answer, but couldn’t speak.
The blonde changed into a dark-complexioned child with black hair. A little girl. Rosswell screamed at her to run away, but she didn’t move.
The blonde reappeared and slipped a dirty spoon to the little girl. The little girl turned around once and showed Rosswell the spoon, now clean. He spun the girl around and discovered that she clutched the spoon, dirty again, behind her back. The back of the girl’s head was bloody, blown away.
Rosswell screamed again. “Get the hell out of here. Don’t you understand plain English?” He screamed and screamed.
The child lost all color, transfiguring into a ghost. Then Rosswell’s father appeared, standing over him with a whip, ready to thrash him. Rosswell glimpsed his mother, hovering behind his father, crying. Rosswell reached around his father, laboring to touch his mother and convince her that everything was all right. He would make sure that nothing hurt her ever again.
Everyone vanished. A curtain fell in his brain and everything faded to black.
Rosswell awoke sweating from the nightmare. He found a tube stuck in his right arm and his left arm patched with a mile’s worth of bandages. The windows had the slatted blinds open. Sunlight poured through the clean glass onto his bed and made a striped pattern on his crisp white covers. A nurse, a gray-haired Sumo wrestler of a woman, as broad as she was tall, fussed with the inverted plastic bag hooked to a tube dripping liquid into his veins. He was certain it held a painkiller of some kind, although his arm still felt as if a thousand bees took turns stinging him. Nonetheless, he felt himself floating on a down comforter a mile thick. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls. Everything hurt except the parts he couldn’t feel.
He lay on death’s cold doorstep. The welcome mat invited him to leave the land of the living and enter the country of the dead.
The nurse squinted. “You awake, honey?” she said in a soft angel’s voice that didn’t match her balloon of a body. If she spoke in an angel’s voice, maybe he’d already passed. “You must’ve been dreaming. You were groaning and making a lot of noise. Mumbling about something.”
The exceptionally good dope dribbling into him made her voice sound heavenly. He spotted a crucifix hanging around her neck. When he turned on his side, a lightning bolt shot through his arm. Maybe the dope wasn’t as good as he’d first thought.
He said, “Am I dead?”
“No.” She rearranged his pillow. “Far from it. You’re in St. Luke’s Hospital.”
“Then, yes, sweetie. I’m awake.”
She giggled. The laughter and voice sounded familiar. “You’re going to be fine.” The nurse straightened the bed sheets while he tried to determine if he knew her. The sheets felt starched and smelled faintly of Clorox. Where had he seen her? Woozy as he was, she still reminded him of someone.
“When can I get out of here?”
“Maybe today. Definitely tomorrow.” She looked over her shoulder, out the door, then back at Rosswell. “I’m not supposed to tell you things like that. Wait for the doctor.”
“Tell me something else.” He tried lifting his left arm. The pain telegraphed spears to the far reaches of his body. “Will I have a cast?”
“No,” the chubby angel said. “You’ll have a bandage for a while but no cast. The doc will be in later to explain everything to you.”
“I need a priest.”
The nurse shuffled to an alcove by the sink and called up Rosswell’s chart on the room’s computer workstation. “Says here when they asked your religious preference early this morning, you said, ‘Occasional’.” She clicked some keys. “You want me to change that to Catholic?”
“No.” Rosswell closed his eyes. “Not yet.”
“Just let me know if you change your mind.”
“Nurse, hand me my glasses, please.” After he put them on, he struggled with putting a name to her face. “What’s your name?” He was sure that he knew the woman, but the dope and the pain kept him from recognizing her.
“Benita Smothers.” She shuffled to the bed and patted the arm without the bandage. “Mabel—she’s my daughter—waits on you down at Merc’s.”
Even with a fogged brain, he was astounded. Ollie’s love interest was Rosswell’s nurse. If she could put up with Ollie, then she had to be a saint. Comfort washed over Rosswell until a jolt of fear creased his spine with icicles straight from hell.
“Listen, Benita, what happened to Tina? Tina Parkmore. What happened to her?”
“The sheriff is waiting out in the hall. I’ll get him.”
That sounded bad. Tina was dead. Benita wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Frizz would break the news to him.
Rosswell said, “About that priest, can you call one for me?” Without Tina, someone would have to pump him full of a good reason to keep on living.
“Sure, Mr. Carew.” Benita seemed delighted to be of service. “I’ll do that for you.”
“Am I going to die?” He turned his head so he wouldn’t have to watch her when she answered.
“Yes.” Rosswell turned back to gawk at her. Once more, Benita smiled and giggled, sounding like Mabel. “We all must die. It’s the rule.” She leaned over him and gently closed her hand on his arm. “But you’re not going to die from that cut. You have a lot of veins and arteries in your arm. The doc say
s the blade didn’t do that much damage and never hit anything major.”
“It hit something or I wouldn’t hurt.”
“You could’ve bled to death if it had hit something major. It didn’t hit anything vital.”
“It’s all vital to me. I’m quite attached to my whole body. And I still need a priest.”
“Mr. Carew?”
“Yes?”
“Do you mind if I call you by your first name?”
“No.”
“I’ll call my brother, the priest over at Sacred Heart. He’s in the hospital right now visiting people. He’s one of our chaplains.” She patted Rosswell’s arm again. “You’re going to be fine, Ross.”
He closed his eyes and whimpered.
Chapter Nine
Tuesday morning, continued
“Rosswell?” Frizz sauntered up to the open doorway, pausing in the hallway to rap his knuckles on the doorjamb. “May I come in?”
“Tina?” The dope stopped working. Rosswell’s heart galloped around his ribcage and sweat trickled down his chest. He reached the crescendo of an adrenaline high. His body reeked of fear. Frizz could not be the bearer of good news.
“It’s bad.” Frizz walked to the edge of the bed. The sheriff must have missed his sleep for the last two days, judging by the lines on his face and the bags under his bloodshot eyes. He removed his hat and rubbed the inside of it with his handkerchief.
After Rosswell belched an acidy belch, he closed his eyes. “When’s the funeral?” Visions of Feliciana’s funeral invaded his brain, soon to be joined by the reality of Tina’s final services.
Frizz dabbed at his eyes, then stuffed the handkerchief into his back pocket. “Funeral?” He put his hat on and stared at Rosswell. “Are you doped up?”
“I’m going to her funeral, I don’t care if you have to push me in this hospital bed, I’m going.”
“There’s no funeral, Rosswell.”
If he said that to calm Rosswell, it wasn’t working. “What’re you saying?” Had it been so bad that they’d already cremated Tina? “Has she already been buried? Did you cremate her and spread her ashes?”